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'The Playstation Job' Heisters Arrested

Posted by simoniker on from the do-17,000-playstations-fit-in-a-mini? dept.

Thanks to the New Jersey Star-Ledger for their news that a gang who stole $5 million worth of PlayStation consoles in a high-tech train heist have been arrested and indicted. According to the article, the theft ring, known as the 'Conrail Boyz', stole more than $20 million of merchandise from freight trains, and their "..largest single take was 17,496 Sony PlayStation electronic game systems worth more than $5 million and involved members driving off with a cargo container, authorities charged." Seriously, what would you do with 17,000 PlayStations?

16 of 59 comments (clear)

  1. easy by sporty · · Score: 4, Funny

    Seriously, what would you do with 17,000 PlayStations?


    Ok guys.. you are making this too easy.

    /beowulf

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    ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only

    1. Re:easy by Henry+V+.009 · · Score: 3, Funny

      Okay, since this is obviously going to turn into one big beowulf love fest, can anybody do the back of the envelope calculation to find out just how powerful a beowulf cluster of 17,000 PlayStations would be?

      For extra credit you can express the answer in terms of Lord of the Rings:Fellowship of the Ring movies rendered per week.

    2. Re:easy by MoOsEb0y · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Well, quoted from here, a ps2 has 6.2 gflops of CPU power in its FPU. There are 17,496 of these units. So that is roughly 108475 gflops of CPU power.

      Quoted from a slashdot article here, there are "over 2000" Xeon 2.8 GHz in the render farm for ROTK. Pulled from google cache as intel's website is crap, here, I learned that a pair of 2.8 ghz xeons has 5.6 gflops of FPU power. Thus, 5.6 * 2000 is 11200 gflops of power for the render farm of ROTK.

      Thus, take 108475 and divide by 11200 and those playstations equal roughly 9.68 ROTK rendering farms.

  2. eBay for the next 3 years by BoomerSooner · · Score: 2, Informative

    or something like that.

    Oh wait, eBay wouldn't sell stolen items?

  3. You can by Metroid72 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Sell them in 3rd world countries. I've personally seen consoles being sold for 3x times their retail price, just because of the shipping and custom overhead.
    If you manage to take them abroad and find a partner that can help you out with the customs burden, you can make all the profit just on the console cost (which was Free as in Beer)

  4. Easy. by dasunt · · Score: 2, Funny

    I'd take all the playstations and use them to develope Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq.

  5. The obvious one..... by hawkstone · · Score: 3, Informative

    This would be redundant as others have suggested it, but I've got a link:

    Build a beowulf cluster of PS2 machines.

  6. It Friday "Dont Read Carefully" day by Mike+Hawk · · Score: 2, Interesting

    These were Playstations. Remember, the little grey box that didn't do anything special except play games that appeal to the lowest common denominator and software copyright violators?

    You guys are all talking about Playstation 2's. The slightly larger black box that is pretty much the same except it can also stand on its end.

    Though link up all 17,000 Playstations if you want. You could do some serious text editing with all that power.

  7. what about eBay? by Numeric · · Score: 3, Funny

    i think they got caught when they tried to sell the PS2s with a quantity of 17000.

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    -- ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space!
  8. What would saddam do? by metalhed77 · · Score: 2, Funny

    Combine many at once into a grid computing target system for scud warheads!

    what?

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    Photos.
  9. Safety in numbers... by NanoGator · · Score: 2, Funny

    "Seriously, what would you do with 17,000 PlayStations?"

    I'd take comfort in knowing that the odds were in my favor that one of them doesn't skip.

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    "Derp de derp."
  10. I don't know about the playstations by rw2 · · Score: 3, Funny

    I don't know what I'd do with the playstations, but I learned yesterday that I could use the shipping container as a way to transport about 30EB of data more quickly than over the internet.

    So I might just keep the container and use it to backup all the, er, images in the Chicago area.

  11. $75 - NEW PS2 IN BOX - No Reserve! by TheLASTjay · · Score: 3, Funny

    Can you say eBay?

    =) jay

  12. Must be modeling themselves after a game... by KU_Fletch · · Score: 3, Funny

    Kids today with their robberies and such. Must of been too much of that Grand Theft Train or Railroad Tycoon.

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    It's not stupid. It's advanced.
  13. What to do w/ 17K PS2s? by gamgee5273 · · Score: 2, Funny
    Okay, of course the obvious answer is "Beowulf cluster." But, the next thing said should be a question:

    Where would they find 17,000 Network Adaptors?

  14. 2+2=5 (million) by nick_davison · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "..largest single take was 17,496 Sony PlayStation electronic game systems worth more than $5 million..." Seriously, what would you do with 17,000 PlayStations?

    I'd probably build them in to a massive beowulf cluster so I could run a massively parallel calculator program.

    17,500 PS2s * $200 (assuming they're the ones with network adapters) comes out to $3.5million. Not $5 million.

    Add to that the fact they're not $200 sales units yet, they're more like $100 wholesale units about to gain a large mark up as they go through distributors, transportation costs and retail. Even sold second hand, assuming you could find 17,500 guys at the pub who all wanted one, you'd be lucky to clear $100 each. So, all in, maybe $1-1.5 million - on a good day. Of course that doesn't make such a good headline.